Wes Kao

I think a pretty first principles driven approach for this, which is to think about how long does it take me right now to get to the reaction I'm looking for from my recipient? If it takes a bunch of back and forth and a bunch of friction, then that's my baseline. And once you start practicing some of these communication skills, how does that speed up?

Being concise is not about absolute word count, it's about economy of words. It's about the density of the insight that you're sharing. And so you can have a 300 word memo that's meandering and long-winded and a thousand word memo that is tight and concise.

I see people like basically think, 'Oh, I want to make this easier to read, more skimmable. I'm just going to throw a bunch of formatting and bullets and turn everything into bullets.' And it's not quite that easy of a solution. It can be a little bit of a crutch, it can be a little bit lazy because you are telling yourself that you're being concise when really, if you had to turn your sentence fragment into a full sentence, a lot of times it actually is harder than you think because you realize that you actually didn't really know exactly what you meant.

I have a framework called strategy, not self-expression. Most of the time, by the time we are giving feedback to someone, we have been frustrated for a while. The goal is behavior change. So if that's the goal, trim everything else that you were about to say that does not actually contribute to that goal and only keep the part that will make the person want to change.

The only solution I found consistently to being concise is preparation. It's not a very glamorous solution by any means, but the clearer I am going into a meeting, going into a conversation, going into a pitch, the better I am at being concise and being able to bring the conversation back to the most important points.

The biggest one is to share your point of view. When you just ask your manager, 'Hey manager, what should we do?' You're putting a lot of cognitive load on your manager to need to think about the problem, think about potential solutions, craft the solution, and then tell you what to do. Whereas if you instead said, 'Hey manager, here's what I think we should do. How does that sound? Where do you see gaps? Am I thinking in the right direction?' You give them something to build off of.

I think a pretty first principles driven approach for this, which is to think about how long does it take me right now to get to the reaction I'm looking for from my recipient? If it takes a bunch of back and forth and a bunch of friction, then that's my baseline. And once you start practicing some of these communication skills, how does that speed up?

I think the blast radius of a poorly written memo is way bigger than most people think. If you are just shooting off a message in a Slack channel with 15 other people, and it's confusing, you didn't include information you should have included, there's going to be a bunch of back and forth. Whereas if you had just taken another look at it, those 15 people would be off to the races.

You can't cut to the chase unless you know what the chase is. You can't unbury the lead unless you know what the lead is. And so that I found is the bottleneck to being concise. It's actually not really being clear of what you are thinking, that's what's leading to being long-winded.

I see a lot of operators who save their best behavior for executives only. And I just don't think that you're going to be able to get enough reps to actually get good at executive communication if you are only doing it with executives.